Changing Times: Lovis Corinth, 1920-1923

In the autumn of 1919, Corinth and his family had moved into their chalet at Urfeld, on the shore of Walchensee (Lake Walchen), to the south of Munich. From then until Corinth’s death, they divided their time between the bustle of Berlin and their garden of Eden by the lake and the mountains.

Corinth combined his new enthusiasm for painting floral arrangements with a gentle portrait of his eleven year-old daughter in Flowers and Daughter Wilhelmine (1920). The flowers shown are dominated by amaryllis, arums, and lilacs. The composition probably reflects Wilhelmine’s shyness at that age.

During the final six years of his life, he must have painted more than sixty views around the family chalet in Bavaria, of which I can only show a small selection. Like many others, Landscape at the Walchensee with Larch (1920) was painted from an observation point on a hill across from the Corinths’ chalet. Bizarrely, this painting was classified as being ‘degenerate art’ by the Nazis in 1937.

The local terrain produces some deceptive appearances, but many of Corinth’s late landscapes have marked tilting in their horizontals, and Walchensee by Moonlight (1920) even shows the same leftward lean in its verticals. This had been prominent in the earliest of his paintings in 1912, following his stroke. Here it probably reflects his shift of emphasis from form to areas of colour, particularly the impasto reflections of the moon on the lake’s still surface.

In 1921, Corinth was awarded an honorary doctorate and made a professor of arts by the University of Königsberg.

Throughout his career, Corinth had made very loose watercolour sketches, usually as preparatory studies for oil paintings. Now, he started to paint watercolour landscapes, such as his Walchensee, Evening Air (1921), which captures the colours of dusk.

Red Christ (1922) is the last, most striking and original of all his many scenes of the crucifixion. Although very modern in its approach and facture, he chose a traditional wood panel as its support, in keeping with much older religious works. The red of Christ’s blood – spurting from the wound made by a spear, and oozing from his other cuts – is exaggerated by the red of the clouds and the sun’s rays.

Susanna and the Elders (1923) revisits the Old Testament story from the book of Daniel, which had brought him success in 1890. The two versions which he painted then had followed tradition, and shown the naked Susanna being spied on by two elders, who then tried to blackmail her, almost causing her death. Here he shows the three figures talking, as the blackmailers put their proposition to Susanna.